Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
At the forthcoming Thunderbolts project conference,
EU 2017 Future Science in Phoenix, Arizona,
experts from a variety of disciplines will present
their unique contributions to the Electric Universe cosmology.
More and more enquirers are exploring this cosmology
to find solutions to lingering scientific puzzles,
including such questions as “What is matter?”,
”Why does matter have mass?” or ”How does matter have energy?”
Today this question is being explored by author and teacher Peter Modell whose book:
“Making Sense” presents a view on the interaction between the mind and the world.
In Phoenix, within the context of the Electric Universe,
Peter will offer a fresh perspective on the age-old question:
What Can Matter Be?
In the context of the EU, mass and matter a clearly distinguished.
Wallace Thornhill has offered a full description of mass.
This leaves the question, ”What then can matter be?”
Here lies the challenge, there are no ready-made answers to draw from,
and responses to the question invariably leave unexplored enigma.
In the case of mass, we measure how an object responds to forces acting on it.
Matter answers a different question:
”What is it that responds in this way?”
Matter raises the ontological question, mass doesn't.
To ask about matter, is to question the physical nature of the world,
a vintage question with a long history.
In Greek philosophy we find the view that matter necessarily appears together with form.
That is, with the characteristics that define it, such as shape, color and morphe.
This coupling of matter with form is known in reference to Aristotle's philosophy
as hylomorphism.
It implies that matter on its own, though of metaphysically interest,
cannot appear in the manifest world.
The coupling of matter and form intertwines content with perception
and points to the fact that to understand the material object
we must take account of the act of perception.
This is the trail we will now follow.
In asking, what is matter,
what are we actually looking for?
Not earth, water, air, fire, nor chemical formulae.
But the question goes further than this:
plants, rocks, buildings, planets, galaxies,
what is the substance they have in common, the matter of all the material things I observe.
This question brings a typical response,
and you know it,
the question what is it?
We begin taking objects apart to find what they are composed of.
For instance, asking what’s a forest, the answer will be trees.
and what's a tree, well, branches, trunk, roots;
and again, what are these, well cells, and what’s a cell, molecules.
And this continues down to the subatomic particles,
where very likely the question gets lost in quantum uncertainties.
This reductionist trail has proven hauntingly attractive,
and in moving to the ever more minute, there's a sense of closing in on the prey.
It's intoxicating for some to feel they're reducing the gap
between the sought-for object and its material manifestation.
But this advance towards the goal, as we’ll see, is merely an illusion.
What is formed in the mind has been weaned from source in being.
This break remains, whatever scale is chosen.
Let's move through this step by step.
When taking apart an object to find out what it is,
the initial object is forgotten and replaced by its components.
We no longer speak of a forest but of a tree;
not of trees, but of a cell; not of cells, but of a molecule and so forth.
By moving to successively smaller scales in order to find what an object is made of,
we are in fact running away from the question.
There comes the surprise of realizing
that components do not make an object what it is.
It is through a global view from the outside, so to speak,
that everything becomes what it is.
There is a reason why it’s so that's not often told, and it's important to know.
When you hear the word forest, or you see one,
a wealth of meaning comes to you spontaneously in a moment.
Forests can conjure in your mind shade, beauty,
sense of joy, fear, getting lost, bears, picnic, anthills, wild berries, escape or...
and so forth; the unending list, interlocking, spreading meanings.
Of course, you don't think through it, a list like this.
If it were conscious, our mind would be so cluttered,
we couldn't make any sense of anything.
Features and feelings, like those mentioned
are present in the meaning you spontaneously have for ‘forest’.
To achieve this meaning there is no process of calculation,
and there is no algorithm.
Instead, in an instant that never registers in our conscious minds,
a vast array of related information and feelings are assembled and integrated
to become a single something: the perceived object.
This happens all the time:
there's a square drawn on a page and in a flash (it) seems a square.
However, to do so means you integrated
the ratios between the lines and angles and where they meet.
Physically something similar is happening.
Take for an example vision.
Light intensities impinging on the retinal cells are transformed into electric pulses
that reach the visual cortex. To the extent I perceive anything,
surely it should be a shower of electrical impulses,
a sort of visual noise.
But no,
the sequence of transmitted pulses became a unitary object,
as for example the bird I am looking at.
How does this happen?
At a moment, entirely out of consciousness, the sequenced pulses
are integrated to become the fully formed object I perceive.
In the blink of an eye, many became one,
and a unit of meaning was delivered at the doorstep of consciousness.
What came before is impossible to determine;
this shows the transformation from the unknowable to the known.
Strange isn't it, how this momentous act is so easily ignored.
Our topic is matter and of course it is matter we're talking of.
The material object we identify has been defined through an act of integration
and therefore holds no hidden content within it.
But wait, if matter itself were to manifest,
size would be irrelevant and it could be gloriously macroscopic.
Now, in the same way that a physical object has a center of mass
that is not formed from anything that is present at that position,
so the object we perceive with the meaning we attribute to it,
is not built up from a specific content,
but through the integration that delivers the object to our conscious minds.
And this fact leads to a further realization: in the act of perceiving
we are not passive onlookers.
Instead we have an active role in bringing all we perceive to manifest as it does.
A deeper understanding would need to go beyond the mind’s activity.
It would reach into precognitive encounter with whatever it is
that generates all we recognize as material objects.
There, presence is shared and experiencer and experienced are not separate.
To reach such a place, we will need to loosen the hylomorphic Gordian knot
that binds matter to form.
Philosopher and physicist have different approaches when it comes to this,
but they complement one another.
Actually the problem became insoluble
when one looked for the kernel of reality in matter.
Isn't this what trapped our thinking into gravity-dominated cosmology?
You see, gravity was thought to come from matter,
and therefore a universe based on gravity preserved the stature of matter.
With the EU model all this changes:
electricity, in assuming the dominant cosmological role,
releases gravity from its presumed quantitative dependence on matter.
Future science can be different,
and we can ask afresh this August, “What can matter be?”
For continuous updates on Space News from the Electric Universe,
stay tuned to
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